Within these walls

Amid the endless debate about what jails are for, whether they work, who should be in and who should be out, does anyone spare a thought for the buildings themselves? Jonathan Glancey on the philosophy of prison architecture
Special report: Prisons

"Norman Stanley Fletcher, you are a habitual criminal ..." It's not so odd that our common impression of prisons is that of clanking steel doors and long, echoing galleries lined with crowded cells watched over by blue-uniformed "screws".

But Porridge, in which Ronnie Barker's TV lag served his time, isn't so far off the mark in terms of prison architecture, with even the latest following a tradition of monumental Victoriana. Only last year, the prison service opened a new wing at Hunterscombe young offenders institution in Oxfordshire, a thing of cell-lined galleries and corridors.

Throughout Britain, Gormenghast-like prisons such as Pentonville, Dartmoor and Strangeways stand as monuments to an age in which they existed both to deter the rising urban proletariat from crime and as models of muscular Christian punishment. As these leviathans towered into mostly industrial skies, smaller jails closed. In 1877, the number of prisons fell from 113 to 56; after 1918, 29 more were closed. Until 1952, only two new prisons were built; those that emerged with the consumer boom of the 50s and the consequent rise in crime were, with the exception of Everthorpe, North Humberside (1958), wings added to existing buildings or conversions of country houses and various institutions.

By the late 50s, Britain's prisons were an architectural ragbag. Attitudes to treatment of prisoners, however, had been moving from detention and repentance towards retraining and rehabilitation. The first new prison to emerge from this thinking was Blundeston, Suffolk, in 1963. Looking like a public school, it had four, four-storey T-shaped cell blocks, each housing 75 prisoners, rather than the hundreds held in the wings of Pentonville, the first and archetypal British radial prison, gathered around a nucleus of communal facilities.

For all its inherent decency, Blundeston proved to be no model for future prison design. Over the next 40 years, government policy was to change with the speed and dexterity of a cat burglar. The escape of the spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 led to the draconian Mountbatten report, calling for maximum security. Industrial relations problems in the 70s and 80s brought a lapse in staff morale and greater separation between jailers and jailed, and though a new liberalism began to take hold in the 80s, public building programmes were so slow that new prisons were 10 years out of date by the time they opened.

Most prisons dating from the 60s tend to be little more than regimented rows of corridors lined with cells. Offering prisoners little or no "defensible" space, they were dangerous and difficult to monitor. Badly constructed buildings shared the problems common to contemporary housing estates: flat roofs, leaks, condensation, ill-ventilated bathrooms.

The one real breakthrough in prison design came in the late 80s, with the setting up of the Prison Building Board. Its fresh look at design was framed by the prison service's new statement of purpose: "Our duty is to look after them [prisoners] with humanity and help them lead law-abiding lives in custody and after release." This sentiment was reinforced by the Woolf and Tumim reports which followed the prison riots that ended in three weeks of violent unrest at Strangeways in April 1990. The aim of the experts - including architects, who were to be given more say in prison planning - was to reduce overcrowding and foster a humane atmosphere in jails.

Famous last words. In 1993, Michael Howard, Margaret Thatcher's rightwing home secretary, promoted a policy of increasing the prison population. Before him, numbers had been falling (from 51,000 in 1988 to a low of 40,600 in 1992); it was widely thought this trend would continue and that prison building should therefore be given low priority.

Instead, the prison population rose by 50% between 1993 and 1998, and could hit 92,000 by 2005, according to Sir Richard Tilt, former head of prison services, if the government persists with its Howard-style policies on crime. His "reforms" have resulted in the growth of private prisons and PFI (private finance initiative) designs - as many cells as possible for the least possible cost.

There has been a spate of pre-fab prisons (designed for lives of 15-17 years) and even the mooring at Weymouth of the Weare, a former floating barracks used in the Falklands conflict and one-time rehab centre for drug crime in New York. The optimism and humanity that flourished in the late 80s have given way to a strange brew of fast-buck, fast-track construction. Prisons now exist as much to make money for investors (who are these people?) as to make politicians look tough.

Now the treadmill has turned full circle and it's back to Victorian architectural and penal values. The politicians' need to win cheap votes by appealing to our basest instincts means prison design has lagged behind that of architecture generally. In the 60s new prisons were pretty much indistinguishable from certain housing estates, hospitals and chain hotels; now, in the 21st century, British architecture is riding high, yet our prisons are, for the most part, pathetic things.

Of course, they are designed to deter and no one expects them to be beautiful (though architectural historians will argue that George Dance's 18th-century Newgate possessed a terrible beauty), but much more effort should go into their design.

Solid construction aside, the prime reason Victorian prisons are considered among the best of Britain's penal institutions is that they are fairly easy to oversee. Major General Sir Joshua Webb, military engineer and the first surveyor general of prisons, designed Pentonville, inspired by the Eastern Penitentiary, Philadelphia. Charles Barry, joint-architect of the Palace of Westminster, added the facades. The interior remains much as it was, with long galleries of cells leading off in three directions from a central observation core. It looks like a shopping arcade without the frills.

The only credible alternative to date is the small wave of property services agency prisons designed and built in the late 80s and early 90s. These include Doncaster, Lancaster Farms and Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes. Like Pentonville, they are based on US precedent (some of the best and equally some of the most degrading prisons are to be found there).

Here, at last, there is some meeting between contemporary architecture and prison design. Woodhill has something of the look of the kind of corporate HQ you expect to find in an 80s business park. A central triangular atrium is flanked by three tiers of cells leading on to walkways. These are easy to supervise. Incidents of violence, in particular sexual assault, are notably low and prisoners and staff meet more often than in radial prisons like Pentonville or postwar corridor or "hotel" designs.

Yet no matter how humane, Woodhill was not to be the way forward. Too decent for macho politicians, according to Leslie Fairweather, architect and co-editor of Prison Architecture, Policy, Design and Experience, (Architectural Press). "What we need," he says, "is a sane, rational and humane policy towards prisons, carried through by successive governments. We won't get that as long as criminal policy is used as a crude vote-catcher. Current hardline policy means we may need 20 new prisons in the next few years and who knows how the balance between the private and public sector will work out. It's a complex situation we're facing and not a very nice one."